The Bewildering Beauty of Recycled Waste

Every day, people generate a volume of trash that weighs roughly as much as a million elephants. By 2050, if things don’t change, the plastic waste in the ocean will outweigh the fish. The Belgian photographer Paul Bulteel is deeply interested in this problem, perhaps in part because he lives in a region that seems to be successfully addressing it. Belgium has one of the highest recycling rates in the world: eighty per cent of its total packaging waste and forty-one per cent of its plastic packaging is transformed into new, reusable materials. (The United States recycles no more than_ _fourteen per cent of its plastic-packaging waste.) For his new book of photographs, “Cycle & Recycle,” Bulteel travelled to recycling plants in Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. He wanted not only to document the “volumes and variety of waste streams,” which photographers and artists have been doing for decades, but also to illustrate and encourage efforts “to recycle waste on an unprecedented scale.”

The result is bewildering, evocative, and often beautiful. Most of the photographs depict a pile of one material, which has been collected and sorted, then shredded, pancaked, stacked, crushed, or otherwise transformed. Although Bulteel seems more interested in the communal than the individual, he occasionally captures a winking narrative detail. One picture shows white and pastel mattresses in two mounds in a warehouse. They look naked, vulnerable, distorted by the years, especially in contrast with the forklift crane that looms over them, painted Aegean blue. The shadow of a man in the driver’s seat of the forklift is barely perceptible. In another image, rectangular metal cages the size of cargo containers are stacked and neatly stuffed with brightly colored textiles. A brown shirt has slipped out of one of them. It dangles down, interrupting the cages’ clean, diagrammatic lines, both a reminder of human foible and a question: Whose shirt?

Other subjects include shards of forest-green glass, slabs of ripped black rubber, vats of alkaline batteries, lolling tongues of white latex foam, disembodied LCD screens, piles of cracked windshields, a nest of chopped telephone cables, steaming indoor compost heaps that evoke the set of “Cats,” and a flattened red car. The photographs are bright, color-saturated, geometric; they suggest a return to order from chaos. Trash art has tended toward grim inspections of the human condition through the wreckage that we leave behind, or, conversely, ironic takes on found treasure. These themes seem to have influenced “Cycle & Recycle,” but Bulteel also distances himself with his earnest optimism. If a number of the practices that the photographs illustrate “were to become commonplace worldwide,” he writes, “at least one of our major planetary environmental challenges would be much better managed.” Ultimately, the book promises a kind of alchemy. The final photo is of five glimmering gold ingots, which were recovered from old mobile phones, circuit boards, and car parts.